Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 23:26:09 -0500 From: Brian Adkins <brian@lojic.com> To: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD Support (was Re: Netscape browser ) Message-ID: <4.1.19990322230145.00f92480@mailbox.iwaynet.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9903221830001.23947-100000@peloton.physics.m ontana.edu> References: <4.2.0.32.19990322181857.03eb8d90@localhost>
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At 06:58 PM 3/22/99 -0700, Brett Taylor wrote: >... >Chris Coleman and I, with others, started Daemon News. Dan Langille (if I >misspelled your name Dan, I'm sorry) has the FreeBSD Diary which I think >is a REALLY great resource. There's now freebsdrocks. There's the >FreeBSDzine. Wes Peters has worked with the people who make Wingz (a >spreadsheet) to put a "works with FreeBSD" sticker on their page. All of >these ARE advocacy efforts. No one asked us to do these - we did them out >of our desire to help FreeBSD (and all of the BSDs in the case of Daemon >News). I haven't even mentioned all the people who help answer questions >for people in -questions and give people an impression of better support >than they get from M$ or Linux people. When I was evaluating FreeBSD (just last week), one of the things that *really* impressed me was the response time on answers to my newbie questions. I was stuck on something at 4:00 am. EST and I fired off a question to freebsd-questions and got several responses that solved the problem in less than an hour! I've had technical support contracts from IBM when I worked on mainframes and from Microsoft and I've *never* had such timely support. In fact, even though my company was paying something like $16,000 per year to Microsoft for support, I inevitably solved the problem through much pain before Microsoft would get back to me with someone that had any degree of clue. I'm relatively new to open source operating systems and I've been thinking about the factors that are relative to the success or failure of operating systems. I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the rules of the game are *very* different for open source OS's. With commercial endeavors such as Windows NT or OS/2, I believe it's more of a zero-sum game. In other words, a win for one commercial OS is a loss for another. With open source OS's, I feel it's more a case of "all ships rise with the tide". Does the success of another free OS hurt FreeBSD? Are people concerned with the amount of PR and momentum that Linux is getting? If marketing and momentum made a good operating system then Microsoft's OS's would be the best - right? Maybe I should ask a fundamental question. What is the goal of the advocacy group specifically, and the FreeBSD organization in general? Is it to attract as many ISV's as possible? Is it to run on the widest variety of hardware? If it is, then I totally misread the philosophy of this group and probably picked the wrong OS ;) Brian Adkins To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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